


cyclamen, or what the thunder said

by untilourapathy (gwendolen_lotte)



Series: colour studies [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Beauty - Freeform, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Colourism, F/F, Family, Female Character of Color, Female-Centric, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Personal Growth, Realistic Bodies, Self-Love, Strong Women, empowerment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 07:50:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14232660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendolen_lotte/pseuds/untilourapathy
Summary: The disbelievers said it was stupid, that it was a waste of time. No one is going to want their hair or nails or face done in a recession. But talk is free, Parvati thinks. And that’s all she wants, really, in a world without community.  A shop where she can meet people, hear their stories. To listen to what they have to say, the voices theProphetwon’t hear; to make a space for the girls like her who spent their childhoods lost, searching. She keeps going - despite the graffiti, the slurs, the overdraft - for the loyal ones, no matter how few.





	cyclamen, or what the thunder said

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TDCat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TDCat/gifts).



> Thank you TDCat, for betaing my CF! I know you’ve been reading a lot of women-centric genfic lately, so I thought I’d write you one! I hope you enjoy xx
> 
> This can be read without reading the first in the series! They are in the same universe but not connected plot-wise.

**i. harvest**

Parvati’s earliest memory is of flushing her mother’s bleaching cream down the loo. Mum had been so pleased at what she presumed to be Parvati’s first display of magic that she never bothered to replace the cream, seeing it as a point of pride.

*

Parvati opens her beauty salon in the midst of a financial crash. Gringotts goes down towards the end of the fiscal year - something to do with dragons and Harry (for when _isn’t_ it Harry) - and she’s gutted. Absolutely gutted, because it’s not as if she has the money to make it through. 

Fuck Lady Day, she thinks. In more than one way. Why is it always the lady?

The investor types - of _course_ \- aren’t going to be giving her anything. They think beauty is fickle, something worthless done by little girls in Second Year, not _serious_ business. That might be true, she thinks, but it doesn’t make it any less valuable. Doesn’t make _her_ any less valuable. They don’t how it is to go down to the Ten Sickle Shop in the January cold, looking at the lip glosses that sell three for two, tacky on her lips. The goblins aren’t really in the space of it either. They don’t know how it feels - to stand in the middle of the five o’clock rush, cheap perfume mixed in with the smell of Poundland’s hand cream as she emerges from the Tube, musty. To feel like you could do anything - and nothing. 

Her little shop makes it five months on the wrong side of Kingsland Road - stripping the walls, warding the shop, installing the loos - before Parvati has to give in and get over the humiliation of asking Padma for money. Goes to ask Harry, goes to ask Cho. They give it to her, of course.

Of course.

The disbelievers said it was stupid, that it was a waste of time. No one is going to want their hair or nails or face done in a recession. But talk is free, Parvati thinks. And that’s all she wants, really, in a world without community. A shop where she can meet people, hear their stories. To listen to what they have to say, the voices the _Prophet_ won’t hear; to make a space for the girls like her who spent their childhoods lost, searching. She keeps going - despite the graffiti, the slurs, the overdraft - for the loyal ones, no matter how few. 

Thing is, at the end of the day, beauty - although it could do lots of things - it isn’t what’s going to keep you alive, and she knows that. Not in the Battle of Hogwarts, where the same red blood split the world apart. But beauty isn’t why she does it. It’s for community, a community of people who aren’t afraid to love themselves, who aren’t afraid to embrace the superficial and do what they want. Because beauty, at the end of the day, is about power, is still a dirty word. It isn’t something to take pride in - it’s something to be bartered, beaten, bullied about. And if you were beautiful, you were weak. Because to be a woman was to be weak, and that was that. 

Parvati takes beauty back, because if she could learn how to love herself, so could they. 

*

She’s always felt ugly, as much as she’s been loved. Skin just a bit too dark for her grandmother’s liking (which her mother never outgrew), never good enough at school to make up for it. 

What’s a woman’s worth, after all? 

White stretch marks line her skin - up and down, side to side - that’d she compare with Lavender in the girls’ loo so long ago, when it was just the two of them in the honeyed dark. It took her four years after the Battle to stop seeing graves in the pockmarks of her skin, and two more to stop tracing her white tiger stripes like they’d bleed. She’s still not quite there. She still traces the fine hairs between her eyebrows with a grimace and tries to hide her stomach - not that there’s anything she actually doesn’t like about the soft roll of fat she pokes when she’s in the shower, she loves it on other girls - because she feels like she has to, at the end of the day. And at least, Parvati thinks, she tries to be honest about still not loving herself enough: her birthmark that straddles her left thigh, her bony ankles and the patch of blistering eczema on her shoulder that stops her wearing bikinis in the summer. 

The part of her body she likes the least is her collarbone, because that’s where Lavender used to kiss her, and seeing her legacy in the mirror everyday is what she would have wanted but also what makes her cry in the back of the shop. No matter how many dates she goes on, no matter how okay she pretends to be, a little bit of her was lost when Lavender died. 

But as she does her hair each morning, the strands always catching in her bangles she wears with a defiant purpose, she lets herself know that she is her own beautiful. 

 

**ii. devotion**

Parvati’s real earliest memory is of crying at a lukewarm bowl of porridge, little.

*

When Parvati was growing up, she had always been told that she was weak. Weak because of many things, but mainly because she wouldn’t stop crying. She’d cry at thunder and rain and at lightning too, for all the things her fears stopped her from doing. _Sparks of hope_ , Padma used to say, patting her leg with her little hand, _and growly clouds that want to say hello_. She’d cry at other things too - when Pansy, with whom she had shared her favourite copies of _Witch Weekly_ before they had got to Hogwarts, had taunted her in First year for sticking up for Nev; when Third year rolled around and she discovered her Boggart was mummies (she wasn’t sure what was worse: seeing her Boggart, or overthinking the meaning behind it); when the Beauxbatons boy she’d met at the Yule Ball wrote his last goodbye after a year of lip-gloss stained letters and overwrought prose. Just because she had accepted it, she thought, didn’t mean she had to like it. 

So weak she’d be, if weak meant tears. But secretly, Parvati thought, everyone else would have been a lot more amicable had they just had a good hard cry. 

Catharsis. 

She knows that the rest of the Hogwarts lot never respected Professor Trelawney, not like Lav and her had done. Maybe, Parvati thinks, it’s because Trelawney was _foolish_. _Silly_ , like them. According to what measures, though? 

But none of that matters. She’ll be her own brand of strong.

*

Some say that love makes you weak, but Parvati knows all the strength she’s ever had comes from caring - caring, maybe, a bit too much.

She’s loved her sister since she was unborn and her parents despite their flaws. She’s cared for another, too. Still does, if anyone asks.

Her crush on Lavender starts from a long-standing love. Parvati had never thought of Lavender as anything more than the person she loved the most in the world - ever since Lav had been the first to sort Gryffindor of their cohort, ever since she’d told Lav Hermione’d been crying in the loos after Charms in First year, when Ron had been an arse. No surprises there, she thinks wryly. So when Lav gets with Ron, she chalks her uneasy feelings she shares with Harry up to disapproval. Lavender and Ron aren’t so suited, she thinks, and they’re a right pain in the Common Room. She’s happy, except she’s not.

She wasn’t _jealous_ , though. She hadn’t been jealous when Lav had fawned over Lockhart in Second year, in the same way Lavender had been completely fine with her going to the Ball with Harry in Fourth. She just wanted Lavender’s attention again, that’s all. 

That’s all. 

She’s partway through Sixth when things change. They’re in bed together, as usual, with Lavender’s elbow wedged in her damp armpit as Parvati’s right leg digs into Lav’s pelvis. The sheets smell of Lavender’s perfume she’d borrowed off Hermione, musty No. 5. It’s just spring again and Parvati watches Lav’s eyes in the sun as she closes her own, letting herself feel the press of Lavender’s fingers at her hip bone. She’s lazy with her crush, letting it fill her mind for once, letting herself dream. So when Lavender does reach up to kiss the tops of her eyelids, lips soft with Parvati’s lip balm, she assumes it’s platonic. It’s not like they haven’t done potentially platonically-questionable things before, snogging when they’ve had a few too many, when she’d first got her period and Lavender taught her how to cast the right spells, and how to insert a tampon when she had magical fatigue. Parvati doesn’t know where Lavender learnt it from, but she’s thankful anyway because she was never taught. Shameful, that.

‘Parvati,’ Lavender says, tugging at Parvati’s top that probably belongs to Padma or Lavender or maybe even Hermione, ‘come here.’

Parvati obliges, sitting up, and kisses her.

Seven months after their first fuck, nervous and more laughter than sex, Lavender asks Hermione to buy her a Muggle book to give to Parvati. _Midnight’s Children_ , because there’s a character called Parvati-the-witch.

‘I love you,’ Lavender says.

They’ve said it since First year, but somehow, this feels different. 

 

**iii. nurture**

The first lesson she learns is heartbreak. Parvati is four and her dead Puffskein lies at her feet and she is so devastated she could die, she thinks. 

The next morning, she wakes.

*

After Lavender dies she doesn’t get out of bed for a week. When she does, she refuses to leave the house, and will only respond to Padma. She knows it’s bad when Hermione comes to visit, daffodils in hand - for that was what Parvati and Lavender had bought for Trewlaney, and Hermione _remembers_. When even the boy from Beauxbatons sends his condolences, she knows she’s gone too far. She gets up, that day. And vows to live her life as she’d want it, because that’s what Lavender would have wanted.

Grief only carries you so far. Parvati stops being able to leave the house a few weeks after, when she sees Mrs Brown’s owl by her windowsill, carrying a package of Lavender’s clothes - from their Hogwarts’ days, because Lavender would never have any post-Hogwarts days. _They_ would never. It was only Parvati, now.

 _She would have wanted you to have them_ , Mrs Brown had written, hand shaky, _and I think it is only right._

Clothes had meant a lot to the two of them, sequestered in their dorm in the Gryffindor Tower, out in the Highlands - fashion was their identity, their armour in the world, the way they had shared their trust with one another. But upon seeing the clothes of a dead girl, Parvati has never hated beauty more.

She gets a job. It’s nondescript, something temporary at the Ministry to help with the clearup after the war. It’s an administrative mess and an emotional one too, and there’s a stack of handkerchiefs in the lobby because people keep tearing up - at the sound of a door slamming, because it reminds them of an argument they’d once had, a rift they never had the chance to mend; at the sound of another person wailing, because it reminds them they’re not alone in their grief. Parvati sifts through the records of the dead and the forgotten, and thinks that perhaps the ones who have it the worst are those still alive.

She feels so guilty about that she refuses to come into work the next day, sitting on her bed in Lavender’s favourite robes, letting herself breathe in the last remains of the girl she’d always love, the girl who never had the chance to become a woman - her best friend. 

She doesn’t know whether it’s better to remember or forget. In the end, she chooses to remember the raw bits, instead of the good. That time Lavender had cried in frustration, unable to deal with being jealous of Parvati’s body, her morning breath as she’d kiss over Lavender’s stretch marks, the sound of an owl hitting the glass of her window with an apology after a fight.

She inhales. 

No. 5. 

*

Her mother had never really approved of her having taken up with a girl, but she hadn’t been _against_ Lavender, really. She had just made passive-aggressive comments about wanting grandchildren and a nice son-in-law whenever she’d come over for lunch and a shag, and that was that. So when Parvati spends the next few months of her life generally being sad, she doesn’t expect her mother to support her like she does. Of course, she’s known her parents have always loved her unconditionally - their worry at wanting to pull the two of them out of Hogwarts is testimony enough - but it’s different, when her mother moves past their differences. Bowls of soup that’s code for _I love you_ , and warm socks and the holes in her duvet patched up. Not that Parvati can’t do that herself, but because it’s the only way her mother had been taught how to love - through the domestic sphere, her only sphere, and Parvati knows that.

Weeks into her mother coming over to her poky flat, with grime settling in the corners of the bath from her conditioner, she comes to the realisation that the reason her mother is doing this isn’t because Parvati can’t, but because Parvati _isn’t_. 

Parvati realises she needs to learn how to love a girl, and that girl is herself. 

 

**iv. power**

Parvati’s first Patronus is an antelope. This makes sense, because she was named after the goddess she saw on her mantlepiece every day. 

*

Fifth year brings Dumbledore’s Army. For once, it’s a fight she wins. She’s lost all others - the fight against herself, most of all. It feels good to be part of something, and that’s what she clings onto. The idea of community as power, togetherness as what binds.

It’s reconstituted for the war, and they win that too. Secretly, when there’s no insect nor mouse to judge her, she wonders whether losing part of her was worth it.

Her world for the world, she thinks. Because three days before - before Lavender _died_ , Parvati had proposed with a ring made up in hornbeam and unicorn hair, Lavender’s exact wand specifications. 

_Maybe she knew_ , a sick part of her whispered. _That’s why she accepted._

Parvati can’t quite remember the moment, now. They say it’s one of the most special moments of your life, but when she tries to remember, all she can smell is the smoke from the last Battle, the stench of wounds being cauterised and a green, green spell. 

She doesn’t like to think about that.

Lavender was buried with her ring. Parvati keeps Lavender’s wand, instead - by her bed, underneath her fash mags and Gringott’s statements and vibrator, and takes it out to look at sometimes, when she’s feeling morose. She does start seeing someone else, one day. Several someone elses, in the end, answering fire-calls in the early morning like the fool she is. But that’s not relevant to her story - Lavender is, because she learns to lose and find herself again, to grieve and grow up, to find strength in her love for a dead girl and her weaknesses, to learn to love herself through her loss.

She has lost, so many times before.

She’s twenty-six and opens a beauty salon in the midst of a financial crash, she lets girls know they’re beautiful in spite of their weaknesses, she learns to love herself even when she doesn’t. She’s still scared of thunder, but she listens, now. Listens to her fears and dresses to impress, she accepts she’ll always hate her nose a little bit and never stop scratching at her shoulder, she’ll never be as smart as Padma or as loving as Lavender or as strong as Hermione, but they’re the women in her life that she respects and despite the jealousy and grief and frustration, she’ll continue to love them, always. 

In that spirit, she asks to meet up with Pansy again. It’s a good twenty years after they’d first met, at a ball held by the Bulstrodes in which all the little ones had been ushered to a corner, too irrelevant to eat canapes with.

‘I’m sorry,’ Pansy says, uncomfortable. She is poised in a too-small chair, wrought from iron and apologies, and Parvati hates her, just for a moment. 

‘For what,’ Parvati wonders, because there’s a lot Pansy’s responsible for - but also a lot she isn’t, because she was just a girl who wasn’t forgiven when the boys-cum-men were. Because women aren’t people, they’re girls first and always. Her greatest flaw, worse than any Dark Lords she’d tried to hand Harry over to.

‘For what could have been,’ Pansy says. ‘If I hadn’t been so cruel in First year, we could still have been friends.’

That’s probably true, because Pansy and Parvati had found a shared bond before Hogwarts, even. They’d loved the pretty dresses of the women at the ball, wanted to grow up to be the one in the tiara or the one in the blue. Parvati still loves the pretty dresses of the women at the ball, but not because of the dresses, but because the women are strong and beautiful in their own way and they can be both. Which is something, given that when Parvati was growing up, she knew of two strong women: Miss Trunchbull and Miss Hardbroom, and she feared them both. 

They had lost a future, that day. Not just a friendship.

They’d set up a club that day, her and Pansy. They’d invited Millicent and Daphne and the other girls there at the ball, because even if she hadn’t liked them, there was a solidarity, there - a shared experience that the boys in their breeches underneath their tailored robes didn’t know about, because they were afforded a kindness by the world that girls will still never know. _Witches and Riches_ , the secret club was called, a completely regrettable name not only because it didn’t make any sense. But there is power in community, and that’s what Parvati keeps, locked away in her music box on her bedside table - a gift from Padma with a kiss.

‘I run a beauty salon,’ Parvati says, out of the blue after a silence, reminiscing.

‘Really,’ Pansy says. ‘I’ll have to come visit. My nails need redoing, and don’t you think my hair would look good purple?’

Parvati knows very well Pansy isn’t in need of a new hairdresser. She probably gets her hair done in the nice shop down Diagon, not one too north-east of Charing Cross to be fashionable. But she appreciates the sentiment anyway, she knows what it means.

‘We’re in Dalston,’ Parvati says, ‘the shop’s called Cyclamen.’

Pansy’s eyes are just a little too piercing for Parvati’s liking. ‘After Lavender, I presume.’

‘It was her favourite flower.’

*

Parvati’s in the service industry. She can earn eight Galleons in twenty minutes doing someone’s hair or nails, but if she sells products, she can afford to pay back Cho and Harry and Padma. She thinks of power and beauty and Lavender and settles on pink, because she knows herself and she’ll always settle on pink. She mocks up several test runs of lipsticks - the shimmery pink gloss is her favourite, because that’s what she and Lav’d always wanted. They’d hated the colour nude always, because no nude was ever right for them. Glosses were better, because those were universal. 

She looks up the names for pinks. Cradle pink, whisper pink, powder pink. Bullshit, she thinks. 

She doesn’t know a whisper that looks like pink at all. 

Parvati thinks back of when she’d been told pink was too girly for her to like, or that she was supposed to like pink, or that to be strong she should reject it even though it was just red and white mixed together. When she had chosen Yule Ball robes of shocking pink, she knew, at the end of the day, that it was a statement. Not that anyone knew nor cared, but it was a statement as an impressionable teen, enough to make her stomach queasy. She learnt that day that strength wasn’t a weakness - but you didn’t have to be cold, either, to be strong. 

So when she presents her prototypes to investors in her best blouse and heels, even, she does not give one shit when they just look mildly constipated upon seeing the lipsticks. ‘It’s like walking into Puddifoot’s,’ they say, scornful with every breath. She is suddenly reminded of thunder and her fears, and leaves with her head held high - because she's come this far on her own and thanks to the love of her friends, and she can do it again.

Puddifoot Pink, she thinks angrily. Her newest collection. 

*

Try as she might to move forward, Parvati still remembers. She remembers being told that she’s too thin and too fat, too short and too tall, too dark and too light. 

Never quite enough. 

But she’s enough to herself, and that’s what counts. She remembers having her arm fall asleep as Lavender’s body lay on hers, naked and unfamiliarly warm. Parvati’s always had cold toes. 

She remembers how her mother always told her she’d end up without a husband, alone, because that was always the biggest fear of every girl growing up without knowing that strength in womanhood was okay. She also knows taking back power in beauty and the classically feminine isn’t universal - Padma won’t have anything to do with makeup and fashion and they respect that in one another, but at least she _can_. 

And that’s what counts.

**Author's Note:**

> I tried plainer prose this time, because of what I was trying to go for! I hope it works <3 This is unbetaed - all mistakes very much my own.
> 
> The section headers are aspects of the goddess Parvati, and ‘the wrong side of Kingsland Road’ is a nod to a comment Tony Blair once made. I personally do not think there are right and wrong sides to roads, only rights and lefts. ‘What the thunder said’ is taken from TS Eliot but is not a direct allusion. 
> 
> This fic was borne of a throwaway mention [from the first fic in this series](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13708347), where Cho is wearing Puddifoot Pink lipstick, from Parvati’s newest collection. I was inspired to look at women-owned businesses and it spiralled from there. 
> 
> I hope you liked it! My tumblr is @untilourapathy, feel free to come say hi!


End file.
